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Not surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.
America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
There is likely a good amount of tungsten, along with other useful elements, sitting buried in US landfills. It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.
I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…
No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong.
Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.
China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.
Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.
The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. We need many of these materials, and we have them, but we haven't had the will to mine them. Lots of people want to open US government lands to these resource extraction outfits, but there's right worry about the potential for ecological destruction.
Not surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.
Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated. America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
Not surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.
Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated. America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…
I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.
I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…
Reserves means something specific in the context of minerals! Reserves measure 'economically viable' deposits. [1] There used to be tons of tungsten mines in the USA, e.g. in Colorado linked below. [1] https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/insights/rcf-partners-blog/... [2] https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-m...
China's secret to having most of the world's Reserves may be that they bored a lot more test holes (to actually know "the rock in >THIS< spot is X% tungsten") than anyone else, then made some more-optimistic assumptions.
I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…
Easy one, then. The administration will kidnap the president of Bolivia, install a replacement and strike a minerals deal.